It had been an incredibly long day. Not only had half of Year Ten decided to stage a protest against a supply teacher, who may well have been a bit of an idiot, but wasn't worth the sheer effort the pupils had put into their protest, but Nicki had gone home ill having practically collapsed, leaving Christine alone to cope with everything going on in her school, which was, if anything, even more chaotic than usual.
She put her heavy laptop bag, containing the replacement for her recently stolen laptop, over one shoulder, her handbag on the other, and picked up the two large canvas bags full of marking from her Year Eleven English class. Slamming the boot of her silver car shut with her one free hand, she made her way to the red front door of her terraced house. Connor and Imogen had gone out tonight, and were staying at the schoolhouse, and so the house would be empty but for Christine and the vast quantities of paperwork she'd amassed over the last few days. She had no idea how much paper being a headmistress could possibly have entailed when she took on the job - or rather, it was forced upon her. On a night like this just a few months ago, she would have opened herself several large bottles of strong alcohol and consumed them until she eventually passed out, waking up cold on the sofa or the floor, surrounded by the empty bottles. Now, she was able to just drink a bottle of water as she marked, occasionally texting a friend or going to get some food from the kitchen to punctuate the many lazily written essays piled up on the cream carpet of her living room.
She pulled her keys out of her pocket and unlocked the front door, trying desperately not to allow any of her bags to slip from her grasp as she opened the door and walked through into the hallway, kicking the door closed behind her. Breathing a sigh of relief, she slipped off her black high heeled court shoes and placed her bags on the polished wooden floor of the hall, the noise echoing around the room. The house seemed empty, without Connor, Imogen or Michael. God, she missed him - Michael. Nights were cold and lonely without him holding her, sleeping next to her, making her coffee in the mornings... but she was determined not to cry. She'd shed enough tears over him recently; stood in the kitchen on a Saturday morning, half expecting him to come up behind her and wrap his arms around her, kissing her hair softly. She'd cried a lot, that first Saturday.
She put her keys down on the worktop as she went into the kitchen, not bothering to look over to the dining table as she walked over to the window to stare out onto the grey-blue sea. The colour of Michael's eyes, she thought, closing her own eyes as she felt the salty tears come. She wouldn't cry.
"Hello." a female voice came, and Christine must have jumped half a foot in the air. Jesus Christ, there was a strange woman in her kitchen, while she was in the otherwise deserted house alone.
Christine slowly turned around, realising that she didn't have her phone the pocket of her grey work trousers, and that she was well and truly alone.
There was a young woman - a girl, actually - probably around sixteen years of age, stood in front of her, in the corner of the neat kitchen. Her bleach blonde hair was wild; wavy and unkempt, tumbling down to her too-small waist. She wore a short lace dress which had once been cream, but had now faded to a vaguely grey colour, and was layered underneath a thick crimson cardigan, rolled up above her bony elbows. Her skin was pale, almost blending into her thick blonde locks, and on her feet she wore black leather boots with tarnished silver buckles. Her hands were in her pockets, and it crossed Christine's mind that she could very easily be concealing a knife on her body. While that prospect scared her, she realised that she didn't actually fear what could happen.
"You don't know me," she began. Her accent was indistinguishable yet clearly Scottish - she could have been from Orkney or Edinburgh, but Christine thought that she was probably a travelling girl with no roots placed in any particular place. She took her hands out of her pockets, and she didn't seem to be carrying anything - her slender hands were shaking, grasping each other as if trying to pretend she had someone holding her hand. Christine shook her head; incapable of speech as never before. She was frozen to the spot, but not in fear - she wasn't sure what she felt, but she wasn't afraid of the girl.
"But I stole your laptop... and I took your TV," she paused, her eyes dropping from Christine's to the floor as if she was embarrassed, "And I sold that rosary... for 50p." She said all of this matter-of-factly, with very little emotion to her words. It was if she was detached from her words, incapable of expression. It reminded Christine of how she'd been as an alcoholic... and suddenly, she saw it. The girl stood in front of her wasn't just a common thief, as other people saw. The keloid scars from needles on her arms, her hollow eyes, her too-skinny body. Other people would have screamed at the girl, shook her, demanded their possessions back. But Christine just couldn't - she was just too much like her young self.
The rosary she was talking about had been that of Christine's mother, and she'd always hated it. Her mother had been a hypocrite; convinced that spending half her time praying made up for the way she treated people - especially her daughter, who had turned to older men and the solace they could bring... and, of course, later, the alcohol they could buy. She was, in a way, glad that the rosary had gone, because it meant that she herself could move on.
The girl seemed to be waiting for a response from Christine, picking at her uneven nails worriedly as she looked desperately at her.
"What's your name?" Christine asked, scrutinizing the girl with her gaze. The girl's indistinguishably coloured eyes met her own, and she opened her mouth but seemed unable to speak for a few seconds.
"Evanna."
"And how old are you, Evanna?"
"I..." she paused, thinking, "I don't know. I was born in October 1996... so nearly seventeen, I suppose." she shrugged, rubbing her face with a small, grubby hand. Her eyes were round, with long, dark, curly eyelashes framing them. Childlike in their innocence, perhaps, but with a guard and a harshness that was very rarely seen in a girl of her age.
"Do you want a drink?" Christine asked Evanna, slowly walking towards her as if she was approaching a ticking bomb.
"Why aren't you shouting at me?" the girl demanded, her eyes shot with confusion. Blue, Christine noticed. Blue with flecks of grey and gold, the irises rimmed with thick black. But the whites of her eyes were bloodshot, her waterline raw red and providing an incredibly stark contrast to the irises.
"Because I know what you feel like. I know that shouting won't get through to you. Maybe you want to be shouted at, because you think it'll shake you out of it, but it won't; you'll just feel worse," Christine explained, watching carefully as Evanna shrank away from her slightly, "Anyway - drink?"
"You don't have anything strong, do you?" the girl asked, biting her bottom lip and looking up at Christine. Evanna was much smaller than her - probably about five feet and two inches; half a foot shorter than the headmistress, and up close, she looked vulnerable, with uneven skin and chapped lips.
Christine shook her head, "No... I'm afraid that's why I know what you feel like."
"Oh... I'm sorry. I, er... anyway, can I just have water, please?"
Christine took a large glass from the cupboard above the sink and filled it with cold water for Evanna, signalling for her to sit down at the table as she got a packet of biscuits from the tin on the windowsill. Evanna sat down slowly, seemingly trying not to mark the large wooden table as she leant on it with her slightly grubby arms. She looked around the kitchen with her big eyes, taking in her surroundings as she was given the tall glass full of cold water, and clung to it with her bony fingers; searing hot skin against ice cold glass.
"Just have that, and we can talk, okay?" Christine asked rhetorically, and Evanna nodded, more to comfort herself than anything. She liked the older woman; she liked the fact that she understood that shouting wouldn't get them anywhere. She was warm, kind and understanding about her, which she'd never encountered in someone else before. She realised that authority didn't work well on addicts.
-
So, I've never written anything about Christine before, but I've sort of grown to like her recently. The song this is based upon is called Reason With Me, and it's by Sinead O'Connor. Evanna is my own character.